Epitopou (5th edition)

July 1st – August 28th 2019

Andros, Greece

Installation / performance

M i k e S c h e r t z e r

C o nf lue nc e (texts by Pablo Neruda & Mike Schertzer)

A conversation.

I speak because a conversation is what I desire.

An exchange. A response, not applause,

not rebuke, not approval nor ridicule.

I want to hear a voice that speaks

swimming words.

And so I speak, I write, I listen and I wait.

And I speak, and I write, and I listen and I wait…

and I wait

for I was born in order to be born, to contain the steps

of all that approaches, of all that beats on my breast like a new

trembling heart

held briefly in arms where the moist and trembling quiet of memory comes unbound from the throb of what cannot live in the space of a single life

I remember no more than a day

which, who knows, was never destined for me,

an interminable day

which had never begun.

This is a story of ports

where one arrives by chance and climbs the hills

and so many things come to pass.

There is one hour alone, long as an artery,

and between the acid and the patience of crumpled time

we voyage through

parting the syllables of fear and tenderness

we all have the words we deserve

I labour silently, circling around myself

but there is a door in every word

a radical empire of mingled unities

draws itself together, surrounding me

there are certitudes

a man can never get over.

I want to measure how much I do not know

and this is how I arrive

casually, I knock, they open, I enter and see

yesterday’s portraits on the walls,

the dining-room of the woman and the man,

the chairs, the beds, the salt-cellars,

only then do I understand

that there they do not know me.

I leave and I know not which streets I walk,

nor how many men that street devours,

how many poor and tantalizing women,

working people of various races

and lamentable remuneration

if a ruin could speak it would confess

from false astrologies and somewhat dismal rites,

changed into the undying and always laid aside,

I have kept a tendency, a solitary savour

in my corner of this universal weakness

I cannot measure the road that may have had no country

darkness is a map with too many roads

where a destination or a place of beginning

must be imagined

and then remembered,

where direction

is a matter of intention

being lost is the always daring

lover of being

found

in this world, rushing, subsiding,

I need more communication,

other languages, other signs;

I want to know this world

here, where the sky has been shed

by a heaven that has crawled elsewhere

the evening speaks

over me

a language I do not recognize

takes me by the hand

the hand inside the hand,

the unreachable reaching

I wished to swim in the most ample lives,

the widest estuaries,

and when, little by little, man came denying me

closing his doors and paths so that I could not touch

his wounded existence with my divining fingers

saddled with bad companions, with diffident dreams

I love that tenacity which still survives in my eyes

In the science of tears a shrine one can’t make out

from this day forward

every thought

an exile

Who loved the lost , cared for the absolute?

The father’s bone, the dead wreck’s timber,

his own goodbye, his very own escape,

his own sad strength, his miserable god?

I lie in wait, then, for the inanimate, the hurt,

and the strange testament which I uphold

with cruel method, written in ashes

in the form of oblivion which I prefer,

the name I give the earth, the value of my dreams,

the endless quantity which I divide

with my weary eyes, every day of this world

the only remaining wilderness is my voice

I meet the storm and its voice of rupture,

its voice from an old book, its hundred-lipped mouth,

and it tells me something, something the wind

devours every day

the unmeasured and unsound

heaven has been approximated

above us

I weep in the midst of what is invaded, amid the uncertain,

amid the growing savour, lending the ear

to the pure circulation, to the increase,

without direction giving way to what is approaching,

to what issues forth dressed in chains and carnations,

I dream, burdened with my moral remains

to be is effortless

fanaticism

How much does a man live, after all?

Does he live a thousand days, or one only?

For a week, or for several centuries?

as the tip of fervor wanders

I have lived

for one day

How long does a man spend dying?

What does it mean to say ‘for ever’?

Lost in this preoccupation,

I set myself to clear things up.

I sought out knowledgeable priests,

I waited for them after their rituals,

I watched them when they went their ways

to visit God and the Devil.

They wearied of my questions,

They on their part knew very little.

They were no more than administrators.

Medical men received me

in between consultations,

a scalpel in each hand,

saturated in aureomycin,

busier each day.

As far as I could tell from their talk,

the problem was as follows:

it was not so much the death of a microbe—

they went down by the ton,

but the few which survived

showed signs of perversity.

They left me so startled

that I sought out the grave-diggers,

I went to the rivers where they burn

enormous painted corpses,

tiny bony bodies,

emperors with an aura

of terrible curses,

women snuffed out at a stroke

by a wave of cholera.

There were whole beaches of dead

and ashy specialists.

When I got the chance

I asked them a slew of questions.

The offered to burn me.

It was all they knew.

In my own country the dead

answered me, between drinks:

‘Get yourself a good woman

and give up this nonsense.’

I never saw people so happy.

Raising their glasses they sang

toasting health and death.

They were huge fornicators.

I returned home, much older

after crossing the world.

Now I ask questions of nobody.

But I know less every day

I must pay for the grace

I may never attain

Of the many men who I am, whom we are,

I cannot settle on a single one.

They are lost to me under the cover of clothing.

They have departed for another city.

When everything seems to be set

to show me off as a man of intelligence,

the fool I keep concealed in my person

takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.

On other occasions I am dozing in the midst

of people of some distinction,

and when I summon my courageous self,

a coward completely unknown to me

swaddles my poor skeleton

in a thousand reservations.

When a stately home bursts into flames,

instead of the firemen I summon,

an arsonist bursts onto the scene,

and he is I. There is nothing I can do.

What must I do to single out myself?

How can I put myself together?

All the books I read

lionize dazzling hero figures,

always brimming with self-assurance.

I die with envy of them;

and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,

I am left in envy of the cowboys,

left admiring even the horses.

But when I call upon my dashing being,

out comes the same old lazy self,

and so I never know just who I am,

nor how many I am, nor who we will be being.

I would like to be able to touch a bell

and call up my real self, the truly me,

because if I really need my proper self,

I must not allow myself to disappear.

While I am writing, I am far away;

and when I come back, I have already left.

I should like to see if the same thing happens

to other people as it does to me,

to see if as many people are as I am,

and if they seem the same ay to themselves.

When this problem has been thoroughly explored

I am going to school myself so well in things

that, when I try to explain my problems,

I shall speak, not of myself, but of geography

if you have followed me here

it's because you are also out of

breath

Sometime, man or woman, or traveler

afterwards, when I am not alive,

look here, look for me here

between the stones and the ocean,

in the light storming

in the foam.

Look here, look for me here,

for here is where I shall come, saying nothing,

no voice, no mouth, pure,

here I shall be again the movement

of the water, of

its wild heart,

here I shall be both lost and found—

here I shall be perhaps both stone and silence

to speak forbidden trees

to insinuate the grub

burrowing beneath an oath

to wed imponderables

and toss their vows

into exasperation

to gather the petals of

a fugitive season

and wear them into battle

to approach concision with alms

to scream birds into being

to bless the rot

of untimely truths

to wipe the earth from your knees

for the last time

in a world without a sky

a statement is a sin

I stride along with calm, with eyes, with shoes,

with fury, with forgetfulness,

I pass, I cross offices and stores full of orthopedic appliances,

and courtyards hung with clothes on wires,

underpants, towels and shirts which weep

slow dirty tears

beneath this bridge

I have wept

for your footsteps

leaning into the afternoon I cast my sad net nets

towards your oceanic eyes

how did love come to you

through a tear in the fabric of your blindness

with a promise protruding from its stem

in the morning of every caress

retreating, heartward and worldless

a stain of belonging

on the lip of an effort

asleep in the arms of its silence

how did love come to you

Between lips and lips there are cities

within your secret name there is a window

the world is desperate to enter

it crossed the bridge of my unfinished body

and then vanished

it stole my voice to use as a map

my hands and my eyes,

these are just a few of the cages

the world drags behind its crusade

for your name

I shall enter the city with as many eyes

as you have, and I shall hold up the vesture

in which you visited me, and let myself be touched

there is a moment

as the night gathers its things

when I open my eyes

when the day is not-yet

and there is a light that knows me,

that has traversed the breach

to find me

I can see

as the day is almost

the embrace of

what once never was and never could be

reaching towards me

from her sleep

your silence hunts down my afflicted hours;

my kisses anchor, and my moist desire nests

in you with your arms of transparent stone.

by the light of the scars

in the sky

of my night-body

that's how you found me

hardened around the lip

of a day, like so many others

I was a word then

and you spoke me

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace

My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road

Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows

and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

the lover bleeds

where no one thinks to look

while the guests are arriving

she stands in the back yard

clutching the fence

because she is sinking and cannot swim

If only you would touch my heart,

if only you would put your lips to my heart,

your delicate mouth, your teeth,

if you would place your tongue like a red arrow

where my crumbling heart is beating,

if you would blow over my heart, near the sea, crying,

it would ring with an obscure sound, the sound of train wheels,

of dreams,

like the to and fro of waters,

like autumn in leaf

for every leaf there comes a day when it realizes

that what it thirsts for is not to be found in trees

I want

to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

fence after speechless fence

I collapse

before your ripeness

At night, in your hand

my watch shone

like a firefly

I heard its ticking

like a dry rustling

coming

from your invisible hand.

Then your hand

went back to my dark breast

to gather my sleep at its beat.

The watch

went on cutting time

with its little saw.

As in a forest

fragments

of wood fell,

little drops, pieces

of branches or nests

without the silence changing,

without the cool darkness ending,

so

the watch went on cutting

from its invisible hand

time, time,

and minutes

fell like leaves,

fibres of broken time,

little black feathers.

I placed

my arm

under your invisible neck,

under its warm weight,

and in my hand

time fell,

the night,

little noises

of wood and of forest,

of divided night,

of fragments of shadows,

of water that falls and falls:

the

sleep fell

from the watch and from

both your sleeping hands,

it fell like a dark water

from the forests,

from the watch

to your body,

out of you it made the nations,

dark water,

time that falls

and runs

inside us.

And that was the way it was that night,

shadow and space, earth

and time,

something that runs and falls

and passes.

And that is the way all the nights

go over the earth,

leaving nothing but a vague

black odour, a leaf falls,

a drop

on the earth,

its sound stops,

the forest sleeps, the waters,

the meadows,

the fields,

the eyes.

I hear you and breathe,

my love,

we sleep.

the moon buries your secret name

amongst the bones of my tired village

Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.

Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish

and oblivion.

in that other place

where my life is

decorated

with the stain of every moment

I reach for the holes

in the lid of your voice

In the old days I went through life

in the grip of a tragic love and cherishing

a little leaflet of quartz

and I nailed life down with my eyes,

I shopped for generosity, walked

in the market of greed, inhaled

the most secret fumes of envy, the inhuman

hostility of masks and men.

I lived a world of everglades

where the sudden flower, the madonna lily

devoured me in her shivering foam

and wherever I set my foot my soul sideslipped

into the jaws of death.

This is the way my poetry as born – no sooner than

redeemed from nettles, won

out of solitude like a punishment,

or how it set apart its most mysterious flower

in the brazen garden, as if to bury it.

Locked out this way, like the dark waters

that live in its deep channels

I ran this way and that seeking the solitude

of every being, the daily hatefulness.

but I have a hidden body

that the world has never held,

a hidden mouth the world cannot hear

and I have built an incomprehensible ladder

and I have set it against the dark sky

and all this time I have been climbing

crossing his unfinished thoughts,

trying to reach something, oh in search of you

his pale eyes flutter in your net

I am the sentence

love serves

and I listen to his instrument trembling within me,

I hear the dream of old companions and of beloved women,

dreams whose throbbing shatters me

he who nourished himself on pure geography and shuddering

my heart, it is late and without shores

to know something is to endure its disfigurements

Perhaps the natural weakness of anxious and distrustful creatures

fitfully craves some stay in time, some space to fill

because when a brick is held to the ear

one can hear the crumbling

of everything that has ever been

created in the image of permanence

Let what I am be then, in some part, at all times,

set and secure, a passionate witness,

taking itself to pieces carefully, unendingly preserving

the obvious pledges made, the original duty.

our calling is

to kneel

beneath acceptance

so that all of our prayers will begin,

as they end

I remember

I have to remember everything,

keep track of blades of grass, the threads

of the untidy event, and

the houses, inch by inch,

the long lines of the railway,

the textured face of pain.

If I should get one rosebush wrong

and confuse night with a hare,

or even if one whole wall

has crumbled in my memory,

I have to make the air again,

steam, the earth, leaves,

hair and bricks as well,

the thorns which pierced me,

the speed of the escape.

Take pity on the poet.

I was always quick to forget

and in those hands of mine

grasped only the intangible

and unrelated things,

which could only be compared

by being non-existent.

The smoke was like an aroma,

the aroma was like smoke,

the skin of a sleeping body

which woke to my kisses;

but do not ask me the date

or the name of what I dreamed—

I cannot measure the road

which may have had no country,

or that truth which changed,

which the day perhaps subdued

to become a wandering light

like a firefly in the dark.

in this

waiting sickness

every voice that manifests more than

the echoes of a collapsing conscience

cascades

into the heart

and all that is crucial

ossifies

and I am bound, with everyone else,

to fathom

how I have been, how we all

have been

marrowed with

the will to stand

upright

Someone is listening to me and, although they do not know it,

those I sing of, those who know

go on being born and will fill up the world.

what we do not write for those who do exist,

we write for those who do not exist

When I close a book

I open life.

I hear faltering cries

among harbours.

I come out of books to people orchards

with the hoarse family of my song

I have never understood

with each conscripted breath

the multitudes

I must outlast

I learned about life

from life itself,

love I learned in a single kiss

and could teach no one anything

except that I have lived

with something in common among men,

when fighting with them,

when saying all their say in my song

I wipe indictments from my eyes

each day can bear more than sacrifice

the wretched have not stolen the earth

yet

I hear them

stumbling through necessity

they word me,

as they word all,

away from the otherwise-

inlands

away

I am

herded

towards their certain

and their blessed

contagion,

towards their all-knowing

retreat of omnitude

begin

again

So, through me, freedom and the sea

will make their answer to the shuttered heart

a word is time in retreat,

a poem is its complete surrender

I am not sure that I make myself understood: when night

approaches from the heights, when the solitary poet

at his window hears the galloping horse of autumn

and the trampled leaves of fear rustle in is arteries

everything falls into the hands which I raise

into the midst of the rain

from the wall that has always been my limit

I watch

love

in its uniform of sacrifice

erases its name

because it does not recognize itself

in words

How much of the shadow that is in my soul I would give to have you back,

the names of the months sound to me like threats

and the word winter is like the sound of a lugubrious drum

calling to things which have vanished, to beings which have vanished,

to substances incomprehensibly inseparable and lost.

I cannot lift the night

into its morning

even exhaustion has a lock and a key

and I must pay for this

proximity to

grace—

it limps as it sweeps

time and consequence

into corners,

and it hums

a lullaby I remember

the beginning is the end:

there is nothing that you owe

you have always been free to go

Now the heavy eyelid

covers the light of the eye

and what was once living

now no longer lives;

what we were, we are not.

And with words, although the letters

still have transparency and sound,

they change and the mouth changes;

the same mouth is now another mouth;

they change, lips, skin, circulation;

another being has occupied our skeleton;

what once was in us now is not.

It has gone, but if they call, we reply;

‘I am here’, knowing we are not,

that what once was, was and is lost,

is lost in the past, and now will not return.

wreathed and unquiet my heart is the captive of its own longing for that far and fatal shore it has never left

While things make up their minds for me,

I leave my will and testament,

my shipshape box of tricks,

in order that, with many readings,

no one can ever learn too much

if not the never-ending motion

of a man clear and confused,

a man of rain and happiness,

energetic and autumn-bound.

And now behind this very page

I go and do not disappear:

I’ll jump into transparency

like a swimmer in the sky

and then I’ll get back to growing

till I’m so small one day

that the wind will take me up

and I wont know my own name

and I won’t be any more when he wakes:

and then I’ll sing in silence

because exhaustion is the privilege of the defeated,

because time is a selfish lover,

because the shelter I have claimed as my own has admitted

the heavens as its proper roof,

because I have at last parted the branches and stepped into

the clearing where words cannot stand,

I will for the sake of formality, for the sake of closure,

deliver one final message.

I will slide it beneath the gates, the gates that never open inward,

the gates that never admit anyone.

It is for the citizens, for the thriving and the seething,

for the elaborate processions and institutions of endlessness,

for the silence that blows in over the walls and through your windows and

over your sleep,

it is for the life that sometimes gathers enough courage to crawl out from

the corner of what is called living that

I leave this—

you too have weapons.